1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for administering the polling of a number of devices for device status.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Currently data centers house many computers which may be monitored either locally or remotely for various errors. In many cases, errors occur in the computers of such data centers which are not automatically reported to a system administrator through an error notification. Although such errors are not reported, in many cases diagnostic light emitting diodes (‘LEDs’) on the computers themselves may display a notification of the error. As such, for a remote administrator to determine the status of such a computer that is not reporting errors, the system administrator may be required to either poll the computer for errors or poll the computer for the current configuration of LEDs identifying the error. In the administration of data centers housing many computers, polling computers for status too frequently can consume too many resources of the system administrator, while polling too infrequently can lead to errors occurring without correction and therefore limiting the resources of the data center.